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Python programming

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  Python programming ngangsia akumbo <ngangsia@gmail.com> - 2014-02-11 16:21 -0800
    Re: Python programming Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2014-02-12 12:17 +1100
    Re: Python programming Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> - 2014-02-11 21:06 -0500
    Re: Python programming Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> - 2014-02-11 18:46 -0800
    Re: Python programming Roy Smith <roy@panix.com> - 2014-02-11 22:02 -0500
      Re: Python programming Gene Heskett <gheskett@wdtv.com> - 2014-02-11 23:14 -0500
      Re: Python programming Mark Lawrence <breamoreboy@yahoo.co.uk> - 2014-02-12 13:41 +0000
      Re: Python programming Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> - 2014-02-12 21:00 -0500
        Re: Python programming Grant Edwards <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2014-02-13 02:57 +0000
          Re: Python programming Roy Smith <roy@panix.com> - 2014-02-12 22:04 -0500
            Re: Python programming Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2014-02-13 14:13 +1100
              Re: Python programming Grant Edwards <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2014-02-13 15:13 +0000
            Re: Python programming William Ray Wing <wrw@mac.com> - 2014-02-12 22:56 -0500
              Re: Python programming Dan Sommers <dan@tombstonezero.net> - 2014-02-13 05:18 +0000
            Re: Python programming Larry Martell <larry.martell@gmail.com> - 2014-02-13 03:30 -0500
    Re: Python programming Asdrúbal Iván Suárez <asdrubalivan.listas@gmail.com> - 2014-02-11 20:01 -0430
    Re: Python programming Ben Finney <ben+python@benfinney.id.au> - 2014-02-12 15:09 +1100
    Re: Python programming Larry Martell <larry.martell@gmail.com> - 2014-02-12 08:55 -0500
      Re: Python programming Roy Smith <roy@panix.com> - 2014-02-12 09:13 -0500
        Re: Python programming Larry Martell <larry.martell@gmail.com> - 2014-02-12 11:43 -0500
        Re: Python programming Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> - 2014-02-12 21:13 -0500
    Re: Python programming Tim Delaney <timothy.c.delaney@gmail.com> - 2014-02-13 08:02 +1100
    Re: Python programming Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2014-02-13 08:34 +1100
    Re: Python programming Tim Delaney <timothy.c.delaney@gmail.com> - 2014-02-13 09:57 +1100
    Re: Python programming Neil Cerutti <neilc@norwich.edu> - 2014-02-13 15:30 +0000
      Re: Python programming ngangsia akumbo <ngangsia@gmail.com> - 2014-02-14 12:29 -0800

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#65964 — Python programming

Please i have a silly question to ask.

How long did it take you to learn how to write programs?

What is the best way i can master thinker?
I know the syntax but using it to write a program is a problem

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#65972

On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 11:21 AM, ngangsia akumbo <ngangsia@gmail.com> wrote:
> Please i have a silly question to ask.
>
> How long did it take you to learn how to write programs?

Well, let's see. I started programming a quarter of a century ago, and
I'm a lot less than a quarter of the way to knowing everything about
programming, so I'd say it'll take at least a hundred years :)

Seriously, you will spend your whole life learning. Just as a program
is never finished, but at some point you ship it, so also a programmer
has never learned, but at some point you start writing things that are
useful to other people. At what point does that happen? Varies
enormously. Lots of teenagers go through a school or uni course on
programming thinking, "I'm going to write a computer game!". That is,
IMO, a bad start to programming - a truly fun game that can be written
after taking a basic comp sci course is going to be a reimplementation
of one that already exists (maybe Othello - that would be within a uni
graduate's skill, I think), which isn't what most people think of when
talking about "writing a computer game". So what's your goal? Automate
some mundane task that you do every day/week/month? You could master
that fairly readily. Win at Jeopardy using a supercomputer? Try
assembling an IBM-level team of experts. :)

> What is the best way i can master thinker?
> I know the syntax but using it to write a program is a problem

As Mark says, mastering tkinter means picking up a tutorial and
working through it. More generally, I would recommend learning *any*
skill (programming or not) by having a need, and chipping away at the
problem until you've solved it to your own satisfaction. Don't learn
tkinter just for the sake of learning tkinter; learn it because you
want to make XYZ, for which you want/need a GUI.

(Until you're an expert programmer already. Then you might learn a new
skill just for the sake of learning it, but there's a difference, and
you'll know it when you get to that point. Sometimes it's fun to
create something under stupid restrictions that make absolutely no
sense - that's part of the basis of code golf, for instance.)

ChrisA

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#65982

On Tue, 11 Feb 2014 16:21:29 -0800 (PST), ngangsia akumbo
<ngangsia@gmail.com> declaimed the following:

>Please i have a silly question to ask.
>
>How long did it take you to learn how to write programs?
>

	Let's see... 6 months in High School to learn the rudiments of K&K
BASIC... 3 months each for Intro to FORTRAN, Intro to COBOL, Advanced
FORTRAN, Advanced COBOL, Assembly... 3 months for Pascal... 3 months for
the System Analysis course, 3 months for the data structures&algorithms...
And that was spread over four years of college, where there were other
classes required (set theory, linear algebra, statistics, graph theory).

	C, C++, Ada (80!) were 4-5 day intensive courses that still only gave
one an intro level [32-40 hours just on one language, vs the
13-week@5hours/week => 65 hours college course]

	Then add in OO Analysis, OO Design, etc.

	Learning the syntax and semantics of a single programming language is
NOT learning to program... 

>What is the best way i can master thinker?

	Uhm... tkinter? That's a framework for a graphical environment; tk is
not Python specific. You need to understand how event driven programs
differ from sequential ones.


-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/

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#65984

On Wednesday, February 12, 2014 5:51:29 AM UTC+5:30, ngangsia akumbo wrote:
> Please i have a silly question to ask.
> 
> 
> How long did it take you to learn how to write programs?
> 
> 
> What is the best way i can master thinker?
> 
> I know the syntax but using it to write a program is a problem

It takes 5 years to become a doctor

It takes 10 years to become a musician

At 3 years or thereabouts, (a typical computer science degree), programming
is a bit easier.  With some shaving off of fluff one could halve that 3 years.
With even more aggressive shaving off, maybe one more halve. But thats it.

And that implies:
- You are working full (and over) time just to learn
- You have a bunch of intelligent and dedicated teachers calibrating your 
progress and your learning-curve
- You have at least normal intelligence
- You dont suffer from excessive delusions
[Just in case you think the last insulting, let me tell you about myself:
When I was doing my first programming class, my 'goal' was to write an Ada 
compiler.  This is called a delusion]

It may help you to have a look at the area as seen for example here:

http://ai.stanford.edu/users/sahami/CS2013/strawman-draft/cs2013-strawman.pdf

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#65986

In article <b2db52b0-d7f7-43dd-9ddf-86feb109ebc8@googlegroups.com>,
 ngangsia akumbo <ngangsia@gmail.com> wrote:

> Please i have a silly question to ask.
> 
> How long did it take you to learn how to write programs?

I've been working on it for 40 years.  I'll let you know when I get 
there.

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#66012

On Tuesday 11 February 2014 23:13:33 Roy Smith did opine:

> In article <b2db52b0-d7f7-43dd-9ddf-86feb109ebc8@googlegroups.com>,
> 
>  ngangsia akumbo <ngangsia@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Please i have a silly question to ask.
> > 
> > How long did it take you to learn how to write programs?
> 
> I've been working on it for 40 years.  I'll let you know when I get
> there.

I started, on an RCA 1802 board in '79.  I'm damned sure not there yet.

Cheers, Gene
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>

NOTICE: Will pay 100 USD for an HP-4815A defective but
complete probe assembly.

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#66034

On 12/02/2014 04:14, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Tuesday 11 February 2014 23:13:33 Roy Smith did opine:
>
>> In article <b2db52b0-d7f7-43dd-9ddf-86feb109ebc8@googlegroups.com>,
>>
>>   ngangsia akumbo <ngangsia@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Please i have a silly question to ask.
>>>
>>> How long did it take you to learn how to write programs?
>>
>> I've been working on it for 40 years.  I'll let you know when I get
>> there.
>
> I started, on an RCA 1802 board in '79.  I'm damned sure not there yet.
>
> Cheers, Gene
>

Snap :)

-- 
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask 
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence

---
This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active.
http://www.avast.com

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#66135

On Wed, 12 Feb 2014 13:41:10 +0000, Mark Lawrence <breamoreboy@yahoo.co.uk>
declaimed the following:

>On 12/02/2014 04:14, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> On Tuesday 11 February 2014 23:13:33 Roy Smith did opine:
>>
>>> In article <b2db52b0-d7f7-43dd-9ddf-86feb109ebc8@googlegroups.com>,
>>>
>>>   ngangsia akumbo <ngangsia@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Please i have a silly question to ask.
>>>>
>>>> How long did it take you to learn how to write programs?
>>>
>>> I've been working on it for 40 years.  I'll let you know when I get
>>> there.
>>
>> I started, on an RCA 1802 board in '79.  I'm damned sure not there yet.
>>
>> Cheers, Gene
>>
>
>Snap :)

	My college digital electronics course never did get up to a working bit
of hardware, though all of us had sent off for Intel's $20 package... I had
that box at work last week, where the chips in it were older than some of
the programmers.

*	Intel 8080
*	5 8212 8-bit buffers (most needed to create the "system controller" as
the 8080 used the 8 data pins for the half the address -- it presented the
address which had to be latched, THEN set the data pins for I/O).
*	8 2102 static RAM (1kB)
*	4 1702 UV EPROM (1kB)
*	8224 clock chip
	And the 8080 series reference manual.

	I added an 8228 system controller, a UART chip, a 20-key decoder, a
2-digit LED controller, and some more efficient memory (some 4-bitx1k
static RAM and an 8bitx1k UV EPROM).

	An S-100 wire-wrap board.

	I hand assembled a monitor program with, as I recall, 0..F, High, Low,
Store, Go functions for the keyboard/display.
-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/

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#66139

On 2014-02-13, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> 	An S-100 wire-wrap board.

Yup, been there done that!

I had a second-hand, off-the-shelf S-100 Z80 CPU board, a second-hand
S-100 memory board with 4KB of DRAM (eight 4Kx1 chips) and 2KB of ROM
(eight 256x8 Intel 1702A EPROMS), a home made backplace PCB with 5 or
6 slots, a home-made S-100 wire-wrapped board with two UARTs and some
other miscellaneous stuff. I shoved it all into rack-mount Motorola
Exorciser chassis I pulled out of a dumpster.

> I hand assembled a monitor program with, as I recall, 0..F, High,
> Low, Store, Go functions for the keyboard/display.

I was living large: I had access to an Intel MDS-800 "blue box" system
in one of the University's labs.  It ran CPM with dual 8" floppies and
an EPROM programmer. [I think it also may have run some proprietary
Intel OS, but I was a CP/M man.] I typed in an assembly language
monitor program out of some book or other, assembled it on the
MDS-800, burned the ROMs, hooked up a borrowed Lear-Siegler ADM3A
terminal to my wire-wrapped serial board, and it actually worked for a
little while before something failed.  Building reliable wire-wrap
stuff is a real art -- unfortunately one I never learned.  It also
could have been the backplane that failed: the S-100 bus connecters
never _quite_ lined up preciesly with the card cage's guides, so there
were probably mechanical stress issues.

-- 
Grant

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#66141

In article <ldhcau$d9v$1@reader1.panix.com>,
 Grant Edwards <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> On 2014-02-13, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> 
> > 	An S-100 wire-wrap board.
> 
> Yup, been there done that!

Never did S-100, but I did do a custom Unibus card (wirewrap).

You know you're working with a Real Computer (tm) when the +5V power 
supply can deliver as much current as an arc welder.

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#66142

On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 2:04 PM, Roy Smith <roy@panix.com> wrote:
> You know you're working with a Real Computer (tm) when the +5V power
> supply can deliver as much current as an arc welder.

That'd run a reasonable number of devices.....

ChrisA

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#66183

On 2014-02-13, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 2:04 PM, Roy Smith <roy@panix.com> wrote:
>> You know you're working with a Real Computer (tm) when the +5V power
>> supply can deliver as much current as an arc welder.
>
> That'd run a reasonable number of devices.....

That depends.  Back in the days of bipolar glue logic and NMOS
microprocessors and peripherals, an Amp didn't get you very much.  :)

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! INSIDE, I have the
                                  at               same personality disorder
                              gmail.com            as LUCY RICARDO!!

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#66148

On Feb 12, 2014, at 10:04 PM, Roy Smith <roy@panix.com> wrote:

> In article <ldhcau$d9v$1@reader1.panix.com>,
> Grant Edwards <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> 
>> On 2014-02-13, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> 	An S-100 wire-wrap board.
>> 
>> Yup, been there done that!
> 
> Never did S-100, but I did do a custom Unibus card (wirewrap).
> 
> You know you're working with a Real Computer (tm) when the +5V power 
> supply can deliver as much current as an arc welder.
> -- 
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

OK, and how many of you remember the original version of the tongue-in-cheek essay "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" from the back page of Datamation?

-Bill

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#66154

On Wed, 12 Feb 2014 22:56:56 -0500, William Ray Wing wrote:

> OK, and how many of you remember the original version of the
> tongue-in-cheek essay "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" from the
> back page of Datamation?

And the April issue of Compubyte (or something like that) with a cover
showing two white room technicians standing on a hard drive with a
thirty three foot radius and an outer track whose speed exceeded the
speed of light?

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#66158

On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 10:56 PM, William Ray Wing <wrw@mac.com> wrote:
> OK, and how many of you remember the original version of the tongue-in-cheek essay "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" from the back page of Datamation?

I do remember it.

http://www.webcitation.org/659yh1oSh

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#65988

[Multipart message — attachments visible in raw view] — view raw

Hello! Well, I got the knowledge at college, it took me a year to know the
basics (But I guess it can take less if you work hard on it). I began with
C, then C++ and right now I'm with Python (I use PHP too). That said, there
are some interesting resources out there that you can use to learn.
Codeacademy is a very good one[1]. Best of luck with your endeavor :)


[1] http://www.codecademy.com



2014-02-11 19:51 GMT-04:30 ngangsia akumbo <ngangsia@gmail.com>:

> Please i have a silly question to ask.
>
> How long did it take you to learn how to write programs?
>
> What is the best way i can master thinker?
> I know the syntax but using it to write a program is a problem
> --
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>

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#65992

ngangsia akumbo <ngangsia@gmail.com> writes:

> Please i have a silly question to ask.
>
> How long did it take you to learn how to write programs?

Please clarify what you mean by “how to write programs”. I could write
programs perhaps ten minutes after beginning to learn; but learning how
to write programs *well* is a learning journey which continues thirty
years later.

So, what are you asking? What level of skill do you want to attain, how
would you describe the goal?

-- 
 \          “In general my children refuse to eat anything that hasn't |
  `\                              danced on television.” —Erma Bombeck |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney

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#66035

On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 7:21 PM, ngangsia akumbo <ngangsia@gmail.com> wrote:
> Please i have a silly question to ask.
>
> How long did it take you to learn how to write programs?

My entire life.

I started in 1975 when I was 16 - taught myself BASIC and wrote a very
crude downhill skiing game. I had dial in access to the mainframe at a
local college (my HS math teacher got that for me). I could only
access it off hours, so I wrote my program to yellow paper tape then
uploaded it over a 110 baud connection. Then taught myself FORTRAN,
then went to college at Rochester Institute of Technology majoring in
Computer Engineering. First class was Pascal, then FORTRAN, which I
tested out of. Then IBM 360 assembly language, then C. After college I
taught myself SQL, shell programming, perl, C++, python, and PHP. And
in just the last 2 years javascript, jQuery, HTML, and CSS. It never
stops.

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#66039

In article <mailman.6757.1392213333.18130.python-list@python.org>,
 Larry Martell <larry.martell@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 7:21 PM, ngangsia akumbo <ngangsia@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Please i have a silly question to ask.
> >
> > How long did it take you to learn how to write programs?
> 
> My entire life.
> 
> I started in 1975 when I was 16 - taught myself BASIC and wrote a very
> crude downhill skiing game. I had dial in access to the mainframe at a
> local college (my HS math teacher got that for me).

Wow, sounds exactly like my experience.  Probably one of these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_2000

Lunar lander.  Hunt the wumpus.  Space War.

Actually, before I was allowed to get access to that, I got some time on 
one of these:

http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/hp9810a.html

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#66055

On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 9:13 AM, Roy Smith <roy@panix.com> wrote:
> In article <mailman.6757.1392213333.18130.python-list@python.org>,
>  Larry Martell <larry.martell@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 7:21 PM, ngangsia akumbo <ngangsia@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Please i have a silly question to ask.
>> >
>> > How long did it take you to learn how to write programs?
>>
>> My entire life.
>>
>> I started in 1975 when I was 16 - taught myself BASIC and wrote a very
>> crude downhill skiing game. I had dial in access to the mainframe at a
>> local college (my HS math teacher got that for me).
>
> Wow, sounds exactly like my experience.  Probably one of these:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_2000

I think it was a Xerox Sigma:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS_Sigma_series

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